The privacy protection of the internet of vehicles resource transaction details based on blockchain

PLoS One. 2025 Jan 3;20(1):e0312854. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0312854. eCollection 2025.

Abstract

The rapid development of Internet of Things technology has promoted the popularization of Internet of Vehicles, and its safety and reliability have become the focus of intelligent transportation system research. Vehicle-road collaboration relies on the collaborative computing and storage resources of the vehicle on-board unit (OBU), which are usually limited. When the vehicle in the edge area needs to do computing tasks such as intelligent driving, but its own computing resources are insufficient. Therefore, it needs other computing resources from idle vehicles and road side unit (RSU). This resource sharing can get additional computing resources to complete the task, and can be more convenient to complete the computing task quickly. Most current studies consider this type of resource sharing as a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network transaction, aiming to stimulate the enthusiasm of vehicle sharing and optimize the utilization of computing resources in edge areas. However, the traditional blockchain transaction mode exposes serious privacy disclosure risks in vehicle networking resource transactions, including the openness and transparency of user identity, transaction details, and transaction addresses, which poses great challenges to data security. Therefore, this study innovatively proposed a blockchain-based privacy protection scheme for vehicle networking resource transaction details. By introducing committed value protection, zero-knowledge proof technology and constructing temporary transaction addressed mechanism. The scheme realized the comprehensive privacy protection of transaction funds, transaction details and transaction addresses, which could effectively avoid the disclosure of users' sensitive information. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed scheme not only greatly enhanced the privacy protection capability, but also ensured the efficiency and security of transaction verification through zero-knowledge proof, avoiding the direct exposure of private keys. Meanwhile, the experimental verification demonstrates that the scheme not only enhances the level of privacy protection but also does not augment the supplementary processing burden. Furthermore, it is evident that the scheme meets the rigorous requirements for real-time resource transactions in the Internet of Vehicles.

MeSH terms

  • Blockchain*
  • Computer Security*
  • Humans
  • Internet of Things
  • Internet*
  • Motor Vehicles
  • Privacy*

Grants and funding

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.